Finished Hatoful Boyfriend. This was highly uninteresting and very boring. I don't recommend it at all.

Full list here.

Broken Sword 1 (original version)

I missed this back in the day, and since I've enjoyed some more recent adventures, I bought it during the sale and played it. Was ok, but on the whole I'm somewhat underwhelmed. I can see why it is considered a classic, the graphics and the voiceover are very charming. On the other hand, I wasn't impressed by the puzzle design at all, it's nothing special and contains at least a few rather illogical actions and unbelievable situations (e.g. in one situation you need to come up with 50$...why is the guy you play as so stupid not to bring some money with him when traveling to a foreign country? Makes no sense). Also not enough hints given imo, but then that's common with those old school adventures. The story was ridiculous nonsense and not that well told imo. Minor nitpick: On several occasions you read Latin sentences and they contain mistakes, really basic stuff...found that annoying.
On the whole worth a playthrough if you like adventures, but I wouldn't rate it among the very best...I'd give it a 3/5.

List so far:

01/08/17: Broken sword 1 (original version)
01/21/17: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the fathers 20th anniversary edition
02/19/17: The Witcher 1.
02/21/17: Flight of the Amazon queen.
03/21: Gothic.
04/09: Gothic 2.
09/02: Commandos 3.
10/17: Thief Gold.
10/22: Thief 2.
11/30: Vampire the masquerade: Bloodlines

Also finished Risen. Ok game, quite nice if you like the Gothic games, but in the end fairly mediocre. The story is a joke. I'd give it 3/5.
Wow, looks like I played a lot of games in 2017...probably should do something more productive.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch (I played the Steam version)

In this game you play an octopus who is trying to impersonate a human. The controls are deliberately difficult; the fun and humour in the game are from trying to accomplish seemingly easy tasks while not being viewed as suspicious by the humans around you.

The game was short & easy (even on “Hard” difficulty) and can be completed in a few hours (including the extra “shorts” missions). The controls themselves are not very hard because the game is very forgiving, where the problems come in is primarily because of the bad camera. It always seems to be pointing in the wrong direction and it is not possible to move it significantly (unlike the first game). This was very frustrating, and not in a good/fun way.

Still, the game has some fun value and I’d rate it “OK”, although overall I greatly preferred the original free game because I think it had more humour and you are able to fully control the camera, although the graphics are not as nice (http://octodadgame.com/octodad/download/).

2017:

Cursed ( finished )
Frankenstein: Master of Death ( finished )
Dracula's Legacy ( finished )
Beyond the Invisible - Evening ( finished )
Urban Legends - The Maze ( in progress )

Finished Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Xbox 360)...again.

I forgot how bad the English voice acting was in this game, and the goofy translation didn't really help either. Outside of maybe the beginning and an optional boss in the second castle, this game is piss easy overall (even if you don't use some of the incredibly overpowered weapons). The Xbox 360 version was missing the original cutscenes that were in the PS1 version, but hey this one has instant loading times...and a garbage filter (that you can thankfully turn off) that just ruins the beautiful pixel art. Looking past those things, I still had a blast playing through it again.

And I just realized the game is going to be 20 years old in a few months. Damn, I'm 24 and I'm starting to feel old.

<span class="bold">Demon Hunter 2: New Chapter</span>

A mediocre HOG, neither the story nor the puzzles in this one are great.

The Stanley Parable (Steam)

This is a short game, it can be at times both serious and hilariously funny. It’s basically an exploration game, but the game closes off behind you depending on which choices you make and there are many different endings depending on where you go and what you do. So you play the game by starting from the beginning over and over again, making different choices.

Hmmmm, reading what I just said it doesn’t sound that great, but if so I must not have explained it very well because it’s actually very fun!

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1

First game finished of the year. I had enough fun (addiction?) to persevere despite the fact that the game had issues with my GPU, and a bunch of the dungeons (including the final one) were just the interface on top of a black screen. In a few cases I even bothered launching the game on my weak-ass laptop which could actually display those dungeons after loading the Steam cloudsave (and run at about 5-10 fps).

i finished GTA omg thats game was good end

Lilly Looking Through

I knew that it's a short game but I don't mind short games at all. I do, however, mind bad games and sadly, it's one of them. It's pretty amazing that such a short game reuses the same color-based puzzle over and over again. I mean, what the heck?! Couldn't they come up with something else?! Other puzzles aren't good neither. They are very similar to each other: they are environmental based plus a occasional "changing world" trick (which is already a cliché nowadays). Some puzzles are very annoying because they are very easy but takes a lot of steps to complete with long animation sequences (silk harvesting part is the biggest offender). The plot doesn't make much sense neither. You have no idea what and why everything is happening and in the end you get a cliffhanger. The only good thing about the game is how it's drawn but that alone cannot make a good game.


Full list

To The Moon

An arty game that is themed as a mashup of Eternal Sunshine, Memento, and Total Recall, kinda.

It's been about 4 years since the last time I played, and I had forgotten how well done it is. Yes, it is more of an interactive movie than a game, but it is really great. Music, pixel art, animation, and text all come together to really make characters stand out and tell a story that has more depth than it appears at first. Better overall experience than A Bird Story, which I also liked.

If you enjoy good simple stories, and can stand the mild sci-fi elements, it is 100% worthwhile. The hype was right when this was new, and it is still one of the best games-as-art examples, and a very good story that makes good use of being between mediums.

I also played the two minisodes. Both are teasers for the sequel, both are set sometime after To The Moon and feature the two controllable characters. Each has the same game play -- basically walking around and interacting with environment and other characters -- and just expand a little on the back story of the game world. Recommend if you like the game and want to learn more, but the glimpses as to the direction of the sequel are small and intriguing, but there is no conclusion in the minis.


And finally, I played The Mirror Lied minigame.

This is the most game-like piece of the set. There's an environment, there's objects to interact with, there's some simple puzzles. It's surreal, it's short, it features the same excellent music, writing, and atmosphere. A very short adventure game with a self-contained story (that leaves plenty of unanswered questions). Easy to recommend on it's own.

I just beat Bard's Tale 1.
I was grinding my guys with infamous Barserkers 99 * 4 by using MIBL spell, which is the only spell damage all monsters.
After they became level 24, finally I invade Mangar's Tower.
The final battle with Mangar was suprisingly easy...he was soon dead by MIBL spells. Guards of Vampire Lords were more tough opponents.

I enjoyed a lot of exploring(writing maps with pen and graph paper rocks) and developing my guys. I like this tactical combat too.
By the way, My bard only used the party AC lower song. Perhaps I should have use more songs.

My full list is here.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - A visually stunning game with a well realized environment (if a bit empty at times). The narrative element is the focus of this experience, and it's generally compelling. However, it's let down by a underwhelming conclusion.

Dune 2000 - Not technically finished, but I decided to stop playing after I got frustrated with one of the missions. This game is extremely similar to the CnC games, which makes sense as they are both developed by Westwood; however, this doesn't play much differently from CnC. The one-unit build limitation and lack of queuing make it annoying to play, and the slow build times don't help. I enjoyed the time I spent playing, but Atreides mission 8 caused me to lose my interest.

Jagged Alliance (PC, 1994)

Sadly it's a mixed bag. The game is very ambitious and innovative for its time, and I enjoyed the characters and managing my team a lot, but it's brutally hard with a fairly dated interface and a lot of downtime between its interesting parts in the form of inventory management and simply moving around the map.

Good: You get to hire and level up a squad of up to 8 mercs (out of 60 different ones, fully voiced and each with their own personality quirks affecting gameplay) which can be replaced at any point, as well as manage CPU controlled guards and workers in conquered territory to be able to fund your team. There are sidequests, some with alternate solutions and you can spy on enemy guards for clues to some of them using a probe. You get to choose which sector to attack, when and from which direction on the world map, and you can escape and re-enter battles as long as you can make it to the edge of the sector with a gathered party. There's a real time element in the form of a day/night cycle - you move out in the morning and need to make it back to a conquered sector before nighttime. If you're finished for the day or need to regain stamina (mercs will move slower and eventually collapse when it's drained), there's a fast forward option you can use outside of battle. Movement is also in real time outside of battle and you can move the entire squad at once like in an RTS, which is kind of neat for 1994. Another cool thing is that you need to use stealth to capture certain sectors with processing plants in them, which give a boost to your economy, or the enemy will blow the plant up with an in-battle soldier using a remote control. It's also not a huge setback if it does get blown up as it will eventually be repaired. Finally the ending can change depending on a couple of actions you take in-game.

Bad: Besides what I mentioned above, you pretty much need to read the manual thoroughly as well as watch part of some LP before playing or you'll probably walk into the game spending too much money, slowly killing everyone off and ending up having to restart after several hours of play. This is because the game can hit you with a lot of unexpected events early on, like your water supply getting poisoned and you having to figure out which sectors to conquer to fix this without much direction, or the CPU guards and workers (and even your mercs) suddenly quitting if you're not doing well enough.

In combat, the game can get annoyingly random by letting the enemy hit your mercs while you can't hit back even with great aiming skills and gear, and your guns also tend to get jammed for a few turns even in pretty good condition (almost everything deteriorates actually, but since you can leave a merc in the base to repair things it's not much of an issue except for the guns jamming). At other times, or after reloading the quicksave, everything might go your way instead. But in general the enemies have an easier time hitting than you do.

Speaking of the enemies, they have a tendency to start running away when low on HP, but never actually retreating from the sector, which can lead to drawn out segments of slowly chasing down the last enemy in a sector. This becomes really tedious with hurt mercs since they lose action points as they lose health, plus their move animation becomes much slower and can't be skipped. Sadly the fast forward option also can't be used to move faster during exploration, making you spend a lot more time with moving around the world map and collecting loot than you'd want to. There are other flaws about the interface that bothered me, but then again I'm picky about that stuff.

Finally I have to mention the swimming, which is a nightmare. If you do play the game, just avoid deep water if you can, as it's very likely that a merc will drown from a random snake attack while swimming just a short distance and it also takes a toll on your gear. It helps to bring a knife for the merc to fight the snake with, but you'll still have to watch a slow animation and will lose a bunch of health and stamina from it. You also can't send someone else in to help the merc from drowning, other than giving them bottled water with which to replenish some stamina.


That got much longer than I intended, but there's a lot to the game that one probably won't catch on first glance. :)
The sequel seems a lot better, and has some mod support. Which I might have to start experimenting with as the original GOG version apparently doesn't work on my Windows 10 PC.

You can use this patch to implement queuing into the game. It may help a lot. Atreides mission 8 is well known for being difficult. In general I think it's the most difficult House.